I’ve messed around with LN nodes on testnet a bunch and now I’m trying out mainnet! I’m using tippin.me since I’m savvy enough to set up my own node but not nearly savvy enough to set up any sort of web based invoice generator.

I don’t really expect much to come from it but I’m just happy using this cool new app and building up the LN community.

Stream is [twitch.tv/komododragonjesus](https://www.twitch.tv/komododragonjesus/) for anyone who’s interested in hanging out.

‘Bitpanda’ is teaming up with the charity SOS Children’s Village to raise 1 Bitcoin to allow young girls to go to school in Uganda where they are often kept home. The company will match all donations until they reach the 1 BTC mark.

Background: WeTrust’s “Spring” platform is currently experimenting with one of the new “Liberal Radicalism” fundraising equations for charitable gift matching (this mechanism was designed by Glen Weyl, Zoe Hitzig, and Vitalik Buterin to make funding of public goods more effective). See [here](https://spring.wetrust.io).

Although the website mentions the use of some LR mechanism, it does not give the actual equation or a calculator showing how this works. Instead, it only shows the amount currently being matched per charity, and thus radically undersells how big of a match you can get for small donations via this campaign. After some digging one of the participating charities explained that [this equation](https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1067262719307509760) is the one being used. I then plugged in data from the website to [estimate]( the missing “match constant” α they have plugged in there. I put it back into the equation being used to evaluate how much matching would result from the minimum donation size (.1 ETH, about 10 USD at current prices) if donated to the current most popular charity.

My mind was blown by the conclusion that small donations [receive a whopping 45:1 matching ratio of almost 4.5 ETH](https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1067275133004455942) at the present time, or a 470 USD match for your 10.50 USD donation. I can’t believe they aren’t advertising this more clearly! And this is genuinely by design, because the whole point of the equation is that it cares more about the total number of donors than just the total amount donated, so small donors are meant to pack a big punch. The way you can think of it is, for this particular charity there have been a few large donors, but they aren’t really going to be matched very much unless a larger number of people donate. Small donations increase the number of people who have donated, and thus increase the matching ratio across the entire amount. Or just go check out that equation if you really want to understand (just realise that the equation is for the total, counting the actual donation, so you need to subtract that out if you are just trying to calculate the match).

Anyways just though that people would be interested in this since I hadn’t seen these details anywhere. It is really cool to see what these mechanisms look like in practice. I definitely felt that my small donation packed a way bigger punch this way, and hopefully you will too. But next time they totally need to make a little calculator on the site so that you can see all of this without having to reverse engineer their whole matching scheme.

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TL;DR: The matching algorithm here is intentionally designed to weight # of donors as more important than total amount donated, so small donations pack a big punch in this campaign. Go check it out!

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Edit: Oh, and they are handing out these ERC-721 “Nifty Shiba” tokens to anyone who donates. https://spring.wetrust.io/nft-about